@Allyson: Your book was recommended to me by someone at Arisia earlier this winter. Very good things were said about it, so you shouldn't be so down on yourself :-).

And now, a bit from a work in progress:

With some regret, Sergeant Miqa pulled his knife from the girl’s chest. Around him, the din of battle had settled to some moans, shuffling of feet, and clomping of hooves. The chopping off of heads and crushing of skulls was over, and the defenseless were being herded together. He could hear the supply wagons coming up the rough road to the farmholt, and between the snap of reins and the jangling of yokes he could detect the clanking of the piles of shackles.

It was easier than the last one, the little feya encampment. That one had no palisade or archer tower, but when the scouts had entered a furious storm of lightning had incinerated a half dozen men. Mortars and gorgons were deemed “too noisy” by His Glory, and it became obvious quickly that the company’s four arcanists could not counter whatever powers the feya possessed. In the end, the entire company had charged in, and overwhelmed the family of gardeners with the crass weight of armored bodies. A few more had died, but the attack had succeeded, and several precious prizes were added to their hoard. The gelle-coated manacles did their work, and some of the men found satisfaction in thrashing the helpless feya, to the point where Miqa had to sequester the captives to ensure that they were not permanently damaged. But for him, such beatings could not quell the memory of that assault.

What Miqa could not forget was the look in the eyes of his dead soldiers.

He shook his head and returned to the moment. Another victory for the Dominion, he thought to himself. The girl shuddered, and he jumped back. But no, it was just a death rattle; her body relaxed and her eyes closed. He was glad for that; this day’s work had been bad enough without their victims rising from the dead to smite them.

“Sergeant,” a voice said over his shoulder, “what is your report?”

Miqa turned and looked up; a horseman had ridden up behind him, and it worried the soldier that he had not heard the horse. The horseman was about as old as Miqa, but of fairer complexion and with better regalia. The sergeant’s studded leather tunic and leggings were blood-spattered, scraped, and worn; the rider had a silverweave tunic and a linen duster, and the helm that hung from his saddlehorn was argent and had a circlet bonded to its brow. His six horse pistols were still slung in their holsters, but the head of his lance had traces of gore on it.

“My Glory, we have made fast our victory,” Miqa reported, giving the proper bow and touch-of-gauntlet to his forehead. “The last defenders are slain, and we have gathered the rest over in the training paddock.” The horseman looked around, and the sergeant pointed to his left. “Over there, sire, behind the smaller barn.”

The horseman nodded. “Good. Are there many?”

Miqa nodded. “About 8 knots, I’d say.”

The horseman nodded absently, then looked down at the girl. “And what’s this, then? A ravishing gone awry?”

Miqa blushed. “No My Glory. I do not allow such things from my men. She,” he pointed his dagger at the girl, “was running, and I made to catch her. She turned and made to throw a flash of light at me, so I brought her down.” He twirled the knife in his hand, and threw it into the ground.

The horseman raised a gray eyebrow. “Are you saying she was a sorceress?”

The sergeant nodded. “Aye, she had the eyes of a feya. I saw the light gathering about her hand.”

The horseman smiled and leaned forward slightly. “Sergeant, you killed a girl who you thought was going to. . . ensorcel you?”

The sergeant shook his head, an irritated look on his leathery face. “I know not, but I could not let her complete her spell!”

The horseman’s smirk made Miqa’s teeth hurt. “Sergeant, I doubt that she could do more than blow a wisp of smoke at you. If she even had some knowledge of a Path, she was not of the maturity to do much with it. I am sure she was trying to scare you off so that she could flee.” He sighed. “But you, you have killed something of value to us. I wish you had just bore her to the ground instead.”

Miqa almost pouted. “With all esteem to your mantle, My Glory, I do not take such chances in a fight. I have seen sorcery’s might before, and I will not chuck runes with my life. We were in battle; she would do whatever she could to keep me off. I acted right.”

“So you think, but this is not a war you have fought before. . . “ the rider’s face hardened at the sergent’s scowl, “. . . and you do not understand your role."

I contributed to a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Billionaires-Bush-Rule-World-Profit/dp/1568583249/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product">book of political humor</a> a few years ago for <a target="_blank" href="http://billionairesforbush.com/index.php">these guys</a>, and have one metric fuckton of unpublished items laying around, waiting for it to be legal to publish any of it. I used to ghostwrite for a political blog and periodically will have ideas grabbed from my journal entries for use in other people's novels, albums, and webcomics. That last bit would take some explanation probably.

Mostly I write about my own life but that's been impossible for awhile. I also write lots of poems and am way too disorganized at the moment to know where I put any of this stuff.

Hi. I'm Jesse and I write little bits of things, scenes that have follow a narrative arc, but are missing large chunks of time and events, at present. When I get these literary cavities filled in maybe it'll be a novel...or I could just publish it now and pretend I'm Irvine Welsh. Zing! We love you, Irvine. Anyway, here are some words. I made them myself.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sheila knew she was trash. She’d always been aware of it in a subconscious, abstract sort of way, the way you know your dog won’t tear your throat out in your sleep but have never even thought about it. She always knew she was trash, but one day she actually realized it, actually thought about it. It was 7:13 in the morning and she was half drunk, at the bar at the end of the trailer park where she lived. Some dirty young guy who’d just got off the night shift and had been pounding shots ever since was leaning way too close, hitting on her with all the subtlety of an A-bomb and a curious sort of upbeat desperation. He wanted it bad and expected to be rejected, but he didn’t let that get him down like other guys. It was then, as she was deciding whether to fuck this guy or just kick his face in, and there, sitting in a shitty bar on the ass end of autumn watching the sun come up over the wastewater treatment plant, that it really occurred to Sheila Jensen that she was trash. But I wouldn’t say it bothered her.------------------------- Jameson Dane had OCD. That’s what everyone called it nowadays. What did it say about America that everyone knew the slang for mental disorders, not just the professionals? And that people talked about them so much they had to abbreviate them. But hell, he thought, just ask somebody from Mexico or Canada or Europe. They could tell you that America was a nation of lunatics. Jameson had to write. He liked the spray paint best, but some occasions called for different tools. He always knew what he had to write, and where. Even if it didn’t make any sense, even if he’d never been to the place before. He didn’t have any choice. But at least he could decide what he wrote it with. Whenever he could, he got the cans out. But here, in the middle of a bus station, he didn’t have time. Quality or nothing with the spray, and there were too many people here. They were gonna see him as it was, he’d just have to give them his mean face and hope they minded their own. At least it was in English this time. He always got a little panic attack when the writing wasn’t in English or Spanish. OK, a big panic attack. It kind of terrified him, the symbols his hands scribbled out, with no rhyme or reason or thought on his own. Sometimes in languages he didn’t know. Saying things he didn’t understand, even when he could read them. And worst of all. The times he could read them. And could understand them. THERE IS HOPE FOR HER HE IS COMING THE BEGINNING IS NOW And one time: STAY IN THE CITY THE PLANE IS GOING TO CRASH Jameson tossed and turned for two days afterwards. He’d written that on a cigarette machine in an extra-grimy auto repair shop. He’d watched the news for two weeks afterwards. No plane crashes in LA. He gradually forgot about it. Then a plane crashed in Wyoming, and he started wondering again. One time he’d had to spell out GO HOME in the middle of the desert with stones. Another time he wrote PAGAN on a mirror with crayons…in somebody else’s home. He’d asked to use the bathroom, they let him in, and he vandalized their mirror and ran. Why did he have to do this? What did it mean? What was the point? What made him do this? He didn’t have any…weird traumas in his past. He wasn’t orphaned, or molested as a child, or beaten by dad or any of that. And even if he were, he knew some fucked-up people. They got fucked-up in different ways. Regular ways. They didn’t smear graceful, flowing words in Russian that spelt out THEY SEE YOU in motor oil on a gym’s windows, so you have to take a photo of it to a college to find out what you wrote with your own two hands. Messages to people you never met from someone you don’t know. Some thing you don‘t know?

I'm currently editing the first draft of my novel Red and Ghost, about a young man encountering the inner mechanisms of the world and the possible extinction of the human species. Here's an excerpt:

The first incursion came on like how one’s foot falls asleep. As sudden realization of the flesh, an explosion of tactile sense rising out of the static noise of sense, a car horn blaring out of the din of street traffic. The stark and jolting knowledge that something was moving in the ether.

It was while I was at Pearson airport, long after the rest of the city had fallen asleep and only a few short hours before it would be waking up again. But planes and flight schedules are creatures out of time, hopping and skipping across clocks like stones across the surface of a pond.

Leave Toronto at six in the morning; arrive in Vancouver by noon, the time spent aboard the plane in flight, five hours. Somewhere you loose an hour and I can’t help but wonder what I did with it.

Did I spend it well?

Or just waste it away, languishing over thoughts of missing time?

This is an escape. Akin to a prison break, the tickets nestled in my pocket are the false documents that will allow me to step out the front gates, like a craft criminal performing the smoothest of deceptions. My reason for this trip is to put as much distance between this city and me as I can with out crossing international borders. Toronto holds nothing in the summer months for a boy of no means who is all too fallible to the pitfalls and snares he laid across town in the cruelty of his youth.

Once aboard the plane I will feel better, once aboard the plane I can begin to forget.

The flight itself will be uneventful, take off, turbulence, the mass clicking of belts being buckled and unbuckled in accordance to backlit diagrams and in-flight announcements. Would you like coffee or tea? Can I offer you headphones for the movie? They’re free, but the pillows aren’t, you have to pay for your dreams and god forbid you’ve stowed your wallet in the convenient overhead compartment. You wont be able to afford to sleep. Not that sleep comes easy in this beige plastic world. With it’s arid air that stings the eyes, along with the incessant drone that seems emanate from everything and nothing at once and the ever nagging irrational fear that the laws of physics will realize man’s trickery and deception and knock this multi-ton metal tube out of the skies. Every pilot knows this, man was never meant to fly and how he does what he does everyday is merely an illusion preformed on the universe. All smoke and mirrors, a magic trick played on the cosmos. This is why pilots live such sultry lives, to keep one partner for to long would mean the odds of them being awoken in the night by the pilot’s screams as he dreamt another dream of plummeting. This is why astronauts also get absolutely obliterated on the cheapest of grain whiskeys before take off. You’d have to be drunk to strap yourself to an oversized firecracker that had the tendency to go sideways whenever a teacher was onboard...

Hopefully get it done by the end of the year. I also write a lot of poetry and somethings that straddle both prose and poetry, but are clearly neither, all of which can be found at www.drownedgods.com

My name is Doug Raymond. I have written a novel entitled The Divine Apathy, a novella entitled The Teen Age Waste Land, am directing an independent horror comedy I wrote called I Was a Teen-age Prom Queen!!, and write for a graphic novel called Welcome to Border City. The 0 issue of the comic should be out before the end of March. The movie will probably be done with principal photography around the same time. Both books are finished and as soon as I finalize cover art, will be available on Amazon's CreateSpace.com.

here's a bit of Teen Age Waste Land that I particularly like:

The night after the funeral I had a dream of a desert landscape, blue-green in hue, where the light came from nowhere because there was no sun. Wherenothing grew but the amount of dust in the air, and it snowed ash. A black riverfertilized nothing, and a cold wind cut between the spaces of a field, filled untothe horizon with the crucified. Maggie was one of the faces, I could not see but Icould feel her there, crying for help, alone in a crowd of the tormented. Sylviapointed the way. I called Mags when I woke up and we skipped school together, went to alocal coffee shop and laughed through watery eyes. So different from thatnightmare girl. So beautiful in the sun. A drizzle seasoned us, more mist than rainreally, not soaking through, but making clothes adhere just a little around thecurves. Her sundress hugged her form, the flowers on them touching her in a waythat made me ache as she bent to take a paper from its bin. For a moment theflowers on her dress, daisies, became hyacinths, and Maggie’s eyes blue-greeneclipses that caught my soul and throttled it, tore it from my body, and with it,every word and name I ever knew. The world was a void, a Technicolor miragedreamed up by an insane, lonely nothingness, in a hopelessly futile attempt toexist. I was neither living nor dead, and I could not speak. So Maggie spoke forme.

My name is Jason A. Clark and I mainly write serialized online fiction concerning Chrysalis Falls, the last city on Earth. However, we've just released our first collection (with each collection coming together in a more or less unified story arc) called The Sons of Adam: A Boy Named Nod Collection. Our next collection for The Pallbearer series called Rate of Decay will be available sometime next month. Currently, The Sons of Adam of is available through CreateSpace via our Gift Shop link at www.chrysalisfalls.com. Here's an excerpt from The Sons of Adam:

Moving on. Yes, moving. Pulling in fact. On a trigger. The trigger causes the action on my revolver to strike the bullet. The powder ignites and flings the lump of metal. The metal does a swan dive into the eye of one of the lagoony colored imps and digs until it reaches its brain.

I bet that really hurts. No. I know it hurts. My body remembers Trevor being shot. It DID definitely hurt.

The boy continues to scream. I wonder if he’s trying to heal the dead too. I pull the trigger again and give him something else to do.

The Wrecking Crew isn’t having fun either. They’re killing cousins and lots of them. For the first time ever, James is already out of knives. The heap of pincushions in front of me tells me where they went. He’s plucking the knives from the dead and throwing them as more and more imps clear the mound of dead in front of him.

They have to. If they don’t keep moving, Manfred and Whitfields’ presents will find them. The two are lobbing little packages the size of kiwi fruit into the room beyond. I keep hearing spray hitting the walls just like someone’s painting.

I wonder what color they chose for the kitchen.

Charles is nowhere to be seen. I’m too busy throwing lumps of lead at internal organs to really see where he is but I have a feeling. My feeling becomes a certainly when the horde of imps all start wailing at once. What was a packed house is starting to slow. The eyes that my metal is doing somersaults into has something new in it.

What was that thing again? It’s sitting in the back of my brain wanting to talk but my finger on the trigger doesn’t care enough to stop and listen.

My name's Simon Spurrier. I'm a comicky-type person as well (Gutsville, Silver Surfer, gooble gabble, gooble gabble), but I suppose I'm "mainly" a novelist these days. Lots and lots of work-for-hire novels under my belt, with which I won't bore you, but the big news at the moment is "Contract", my urban-crime-horror-black-comedy-weirdfest. It was published by Hodder Headline last year, was published temporarily as a free Internet giveaway (a la Radiohead), has received a stupefyingly positive response (The Sunday Times called it a "tour de force", SFX has raved about it, etc etc)... and has succeeded in selling an "okay" amount.

Which is to say: everyone who's read it has loved it. It's just a shame more people don't know it's out there. Debut Author, thy name is Mud.

It's been optioned by some Big Scary Hollywood People, so there's always the chance (hahahahaha) it'll get a publicity kick up the arse in that direction, but OhSoMuchMuch more likely is that my second novel - which I'm getting stuck into now - will serve as a cache-building Brand Injection. Never underestimate the ubiquity of marketing in publishing.

Anyways, check it out. It's about a London-based hitman whose victims (somewhat unfairly, he feels) start coming back to life. It's available through all UK bookstores, plus via our good chums at AMAZON (or indeed my own humble WEBSITE), and is graced by a truly beautiful front cover which looks a lot like this:

I unzip my mouth. I speak with a guttural growl I never knew I had. “Turn yourselves into the authorities. They'll see to his wounds.”

“Fuck off, you GIMP!” shouts Sixteen as he supports Speed Freak out of the alley into the light.

I make sure they're gone. I'm glad I opened the zip, else my goggles would be steamed by my breath heaving out of me. I feel her breath behind me... impossible. The PVC would stop it, yet my skin starts to prickle with the sound of her breathing, imagining her chest heaving...

I turn on my heel like a dancer. I am inches from her. The steam from our breathing mixes in the cold rain.

I turn my voice to the growl again, “You need to see a doctor...”

“What?” She looks past me to the floor. “My fucking PHONE!”

She pushes past me and hurriedly limps to where Speed Freak had been. The blood spattered remains of a tiny mobile phone were crushed into the ground.

Hi, I'm Richard Kadrey. I wrote Metrophage, plus a lot of things you've probably never heard of. My new novel is Butcher Bird, from Night Shade Books. You can get the dead tree version on Amazon or you can grab the text of the entire book for free online.

It is a power Luis Conrado is very familiar with, especially when he assumes his super-powered alter ego Habagat.

Having the power to fly with the eagles, the strength of a hundred men, and the ability to withstand pain and injury can sometimes pale in comparison to the shining, blinding power of fame.

Standing in that blazing spotlight for too long, Conrado does not notice the ones standing in the shadows. The architects of his fame.

The ones who hold the true power.

David Hontiveros' PELICULA shows what happens behind the scenes in realm of Philippine showbiz; where we discover that talent managers are actually witch doctors and actors and actresses can be manipulated and conjured with black magic.

My name is Mordy and while I'm generally a music critic (Rolling Stone, Village Voice, some other places), I've got a collection of short fiction that I'm shipping around. It's what I'd guess you'd call literary fiction, and mostly concerns the experience of being a young [Jewish] person living in NYC. Here's a short excerpt from Hal Jordan Saves Shabbat:

He laughed. “Sometimes I get embarrassed. And sometimes I get bored in shul. And sometimes I’d much rather be cosplaying. And also, you promised this month you’d get one.”“I’m going to be Lois Lane, right?”“No, Star Sapphire. We talked about this already.”“Isn’t she the evil one?”“Yes, but they’re boyfriend and girlfriend.”“Oh right. She’s the Jewish one.”“Well, we don’t know if she’s Jewish. Her name is Jillian Pearlman so, you know,” he shrugged. “I mean, I think she’s Jewish. With a name like that. But maybe it’s just her father whose Jewish.”“I think, if they never specified otherwise…”“They never did.”I smiled at him. “Then let’s just pretend she’s Jewish.”He went to put his arm around my shoulders, but then we saw an elderly Jewish couple crossing the street ahead of us. He was limping and she was standing beside him, defiantly. They were the older Orthodox generation, who lived here before the people who started our synagogue ever did. They probably had owned their apartment for fifty years and probably only paid a hundred bucks a month because of rent control. And they were very devout, and they were very observant, and they probably would’ve balked at the sight of a young Jewish couple touching in public. They probably would’ve said; Save that for the bedroom. And so instead he dropped his arm to the side. But I bumped into him – by accident on purpose – so he knew that I knew and so we both knew. And even if he couldn’t put his arm around me in public, we could both pretend he was. And maybe I was just tolerating the costumes, and the power rings, and long white boxes in the back of our closet full of plastic-wrapped comics and all the names I wish I didn’t remember like Hal Jordan and Alan Scott and John Stewart and Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner (who wasn’t as good, except when Morrison wrote him) and all the rest which were taking up real estate in my brain. But some things are worth the sacrifice. Like loving the guy you’re walking with on a Saturday morning to hear a shmooze from a Rabbi that was probably just as boring as the list of powers that the green power ring bestows on its wearers.

My name is Bobby Harrell. I'm a writer and library clerk living in Gulfport, Mississippi. My email address is bobby.d.harrell@gmail.com. I've written one short novel about losing your job and your mind and I'm working on another about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and alcoholism. The expert is from the first novel, End Times.

Jamie stood at his front door, keys in hand; staring at the letter taped dead center. He suddenly felt liked he’d been separated like a guillotine by the few words on the paper. Most of the paper’s meaning washed away then from his mind, except for one word in red. Eviction. After that, the rest didn’t matter. Jamie eyed it for a few more minutes, then went into his apartment and closed the door. Jamie took off his red and blue work shirt and let it fall to the off-white carpet floor. He then unbuckled his belt, undid his zipper and pulled his pants over his shoes. He stood over his empty work clothes, now looking more like the last traces of a disappearing man. Jamie wondered if he could make himself feel as empty as the clothes. He sat on his couch, the floral one given to him by Deedra before she left the paper and moved back to Kentucky. She’d helped him get the job, and then bailed after two months to get married and start having children in the grand Catholic tradition. Jamie thought about what had happened to get him to this place. It’s not like he didn’t know this day was going to come. After being without a “real” job for months, he didn’t have the money to pay the rent. It was like an algebraic equation, Jamie’s worse subject in school. A + B= homelessness. He’d found his place not long after moving to South Carolina. An aging high school, sliced and shuffled into apartments, had not been cheap even when Jamie was a working professional. It looked like an old war-torn plantation mansion on the outside, but the long inner hall, with its lacquered wood floor with carpeted side runners and glorious echo, seemed to him to be the right place to live while beginning a career. The first few weeks after he’d moved in felt to Jamie like he was living in a monastery, with every wall in his apartment bare bones white and no furniture to speak of. The front entrance to the apartments still bore a motto in gold plate on an arch from it's time as a school: “Do right, because it is right.” Jamie took that idea with him to work in those first peaceful weeks. After a while, it just didn’t seem to stick as well anymore. The apartment had turned out to be a lot like his former job as a reporter, beautiful as long as you didn’t pay close attention to any one detail for more than a few minutes. Then one day you notice chunks of wood, painted white like the walls, screwed over holes in the drywall. Someone had painted over a strip of duct tape over the mirror in the bathroom. Mold clung defiantly to the shower and tub, black as new pavement in some places and pink as sunburned skin in others, no matter how hard he scrubbed.

That guy there is my narrator, Daisy, a sort-of fair-haired Alan Moore wearing a tinfoil beanie, a fuzzy woman's bathrobe, slippers, and carrying around a sentient wooden crate. He's kick-ass.

But not as kick-ass as his sidekick, Pedal:

My god, I love that girl! These illustrations are by comic book genius Thomas Boatwright (The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo, Cemetery Blues). He'll be providing TWENTY full-page illustrations for the novel when it hits shelves soon-ish (no absolute date yet), because I am one lucky, lucky mother-fucking dog.

The book is titled THE QUIET REVOLUTION and could be best described as Independance Day meets William S. Burroughs. Daisy has seven days to halt an interstellar invasion that brings with it the promise of totalitarian peace. Maybe. If he's not just out of his mother-loving mind. A very big book (740 pages!) but a wild one.

Here's the first few pages. Please let me know what you think!And visit my MYSPACE PAGE for more art samples, news, and tons of comic book reviews (which I also do for BROKEN FRONTIER)!

FIRST TWO PAGES:

(Transcript IHVH 0-314159-22418-7 A-1 begins by the authority of the caucus and the acquiescence of the speaker.)

So this black man…called Bwana…well, we called him Bwana…“Bwana Bum” to be precise (he was homeless and slightly filthy and definitely smelly; it was conceived as this terribly inconsiderate joke, but then the name fit and stuck and he never seemed to mind and so there you are). This Bwana Bum, me and him, we were talking about Jesus—don’t ask me how we got on the topic, it isn’t important, but the topic was pertinent to the moment, and…anyway, so we were talking about this biblical-Jesus and how he doesn’t jibe with the historical figure of Jeshua (which was Jesus’ actual nom de plume before the Greeks made it their own, forever bastardized it into the infamous, Anglicized variant it remains today, a truth that few educated Christians are keen to but which your average psychopathic malcontent is well versed). So we’re talking about this Jesus-who-is-really-Jeshua guy, and Bwana—he looks me straight in the eye…and he asks—and he spoke in this weird form of heightened, semi-broken English—and though I recall his words perfectly, I’m gonna try to emulate his voice—though I might suck at it—just to warn you—so he asks:

“Are you of belief, Daisy-duck, that this Jeshua man, if he was made to be beholding inside of him an understanding, that peoples of far future timings were to be calling him ‘The Christ’, and crafting with likenesses religious objects not of his own making, images he would believing not to be good, and that he might even consider very ugly. Do you think then, that he would still choose to do all that he did?”

“No, I suppose not,” I said off-handedly (I was somewhat preoccupied at the time).

“Precisely,” Bwana remarked, pleased that I’d followed and been agreeable, two things I was neither prone to be nor do. He said: “This Jeshua man, he chose to do all that he did, because he was of belief that he could do such things, things much greater than himself—and also, he was of belief such wonderful things come not from the anybody but the he. So…belief that man is more knowing, more righteous, more right than any other, no matter how much this be true…it is dangerous thing. Beyond belief. Do you see, friend Daisy?”

“Uh…yeah…,” I said, my finger hovering over the button that would blow up the world.

(speaker pauses)

You know what? This isn’t doing it justice; let me start from the beginning.

I'm Paul Addison, a web and radio producer living in Belfast. I'm writing a book called 'NORTH' which is a horror/fantasy/western with some science-fiction thrown in. I'm halfway through the writing of it, and all the way through the plot skeleton for the whole thing and another three ('South', 'Sky' and 'Past'). I'm setting up a blog at norththenovel.blogspot.com to post snippets and share ideas for getting stuff from our heads into words. It'll be up and running by Wednesday 12th.

I'm loving this thread. Almost everything I've read I've enjoyed and been a bit inspired by.

1: North

To the North came the first of the cold winds and it chased and corralled the snow before it. From the high places at the top of the world, it lifted itself and moved across the glaciers, above a river, and beneath the stars, with an icy speed and purpose. It travelled a day and a night before it came to a reef of cloud resting above a wide lake.

The first of the cold winds drove the cloud south and worked as it went, until, its strength diminishing, it came to rest and laid the cloud like a quilt half across the spine of a mountain range and half above a deep valley.

In the centre of the cloud, the first molecule of water-vapour froze and fell, six-winged and unique, to the dreaming world below. Before long, another froze and fell, and then another and another and another. The first of the cold winds, its business complete, rested and waited for reinforcements.

At first light, the men of the North who lived in the deep valley, stood at the foot of the mountains and looked at the faint dustings of snow. They sifted the cold air with their noses, then breathed deep, and knew that half-a-year of winter had come. They had seen the days dwindling, the rivers running more slowly, the birds moving in great arcs towards the south, and knew that even the weakest and briefest light would soon dissolve to blackness altogether.

The men of the North began to prepare, driving their stock from the mountains down into the great barns in the valley and selecting those animals to be used for food, for clothing, for fuel and for tallow.

The women of the North, too, were busy with preparations, darning last winter’s hides and filling larders with vegetables and cured meat. The edges of the windows were waxed, tarpaulins staked across vegetable gardens.

That night, the Big Snows came and the men and women of the North drew closer to their fireplaces, waiting for the land to change and the ritual of engulfment.

And a bit from later on:

4: MarcusIn the time it takes him to slowly blink three times, Marcus has catalogued almost one hundred objects in the room which, should he need to, his dark and agile hands can later turn to weaponry.

The first blink and his mind measures the lobby’s dimensions, retrieves the opulent topography of its shapes and furnishings – the copper marbled floors and pillars, complex chandeliers, tall and verdant plants, low and wide waiting sofas, deep reception desk, piano - then rebuilds them into a faithful mental analogue. He has noted five exits, including the sliding glass entrance-doors he has just stepped through but excluding the four elevators, made unreliable through timing and potential for loss of power.

Marcus blinks again and populates this internal, visual lobby with the people he sees: the Night Manager, the desk clerk, the piano-player, the bellhop, the quietly waiting couple, the drunk and squabbling party of six business people, negotiating cab fares. Already he has assessed each for threat and weakness, timed how long it will take him to cross the room, and calculated the moments and movements required to close them down.

I wrote some short stories and a bunch of essays (some scripts to short films and animations too). Everything in portuguese. Ah, and there is this dissertation to the master´s degree about Lovecraft fiction and concepctions.

I have a couple of short film scripts up and the prologueueueueueue for my comic/movie Daughters of the Cross I'm writing, but not drawing. Because my drawing sucks more anus than is healthily acceptable.

So here's my short film script that was originally titled "CSI: Unicorns" so, you know. Read at your own risk. I picture the guy from CSI: Miami playing the main character in this one.

Here's "Human Resources", a short comedy about cannibalism and business. It actually got filmed for my film schools portfolio short film thingy. Here's the Youtube link. Cause we all love Youtube.

Aaaaaaand here' the prologue for what was originally an action/adventure/western/thingy screenplay but is now being turned into a comic thingy drawn by this crazy lady. It's all post apocalyptic and about faith and shit. It's all metaphorical and shit. It also has chicks shooting people with guns, so there's that too.